


A Speculative Analysis of Shiro, Haggar, and the Rift

by violethowler



Series: VLD Meta Analysis [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Analysis, Essays, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Season/Series 08 Spoilers, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 19:42:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17873609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violethowler/pseuds/violethowler
Summary: Looking back on the narrative of Voltron: Legendary Defender, the answers to what Haggar is up to and why she was so interested in Shiro were right in front of us the whole time. We just couldn't see them because they were cut into pieces and packed into subtext.





	A Speculative Analysis of Shiro, Haggar, and the Rift

**Author's Note:**

> I think I’ve done it. I think I may have managed to crack the code and figure out what Haggar’s plan for Shiro was. I was sitting in art history class last night thinking about how fans had so many theories about what Haggar was up to that were ultimately disproven by Season 8 when I suddenly remembered this one line from season 3 that started a chain reaction in my head as all the little details and narrative puzzle pieces we’d been given over the series (even in the butchered version of Season 8 that we got) that not only painted a coherent picture of what Haggar’s endgame had been, but also explained just why she had been so interested in Shiro enough to clone him so many times.

It’s been an ongoing complaint in the fandom that we never find out what Haggar’s plans were for Shiro when she said he “could have been our greatest weapon”. But I was struck by a burst of inspiration while sitting in art history class the other day and realized that the answer had been there all along. It was just that nobody noticed it because it was another aspect of the narrative where the writers took the “show, don’t tell” maxim too far. Ironic, considering that they straight up told us Haggar’s plan all the way back in Season 3. All that changed since then was the “why” and “how”.

In the flashbacks of their resurrection in “The Legend Begins”, Coran’s narration outlines that the reason Zarkon was hunting for Voltron so fervently that he was still looking ten thousand years later was because he was trying to re-open a rift to the Quintessence Field. (That was how the Paladins deduced that Lotor was attempting to do the same with Sincline) Because of her status in the Empire as Zarkon’s right hand and, as others have noted, the sense that despite her deference to him she’s the one ultimately calling the shots, this means that Haggar and Zarkon have been jointly working towards the goal of re-entering the Rift for millennia.

And it makes sense when you think about it. Zarkon may have wanted to reclaim the Black Lion for the sake of his ego, but he was too invested in obtaining all five lions after ten thousand years for it to just be for his ego alone. Haggar’s line in Season 2 that his obsession with the Black Lion is clouding his judgement already read like an admonishment not to let his wounded pride distract him from the big picture even before Season 3, and with that line in The Legend Begins, it basically amounts to “hey dumbass, getting back into the Rift is more important than your battered ego.”

It makes a great deal of sense that Haggar was trying to re-access the rift because all of her projects that we see in arc one play a role in her ultimate success in Season 8. The fact that the Altean mechs are referred to as Robeasts means we, the audience, are supposed to look back on the mindless monsters fought in the first act as prototypes of the intelligently-piloted mecha seen in the third. As for the Komar, it’s there to serve as an energy source. In all of the times that Voltron is shown traversing between realities in Seasons 3 – 6, it’s only ever entered an existing rift (Hole in the Sky, The Legend Begins) or re-opened one that was recently closed (Hole in the Sky, Defender of All Universes). We have never seen Voltron open a brand-new rift between realities all by itself. That’s where the Robeasts and the Komar come in.    

In Season 8, we see Haggar tear open a portal to the Quintessence Field after draining the quintessence of at least four different planets, amplified by the Olkari echo cubes, and the White Lion of Oriande. Since she was simply creating an opening large enough and long enough to return Sincline to the main reality, she didn’t need Voltron to pull off just that. This communicates to the audience that it takes a massive amount of Quintessence. Considering the emphasis placed on her Komar, we can surmise that while Zarkon dedicated the Galra fleet to capturing Voltron, Haggar’s primary research has been dedicated to amassing enough Quintessence to tear open a rift to the Quintessence Field once they had Voltron.   

But the Komar we see in the first arc has its limits. Its range is limited and can only be used on planets that are within range of Zarkon’s command ship. Not to mention that Season 2 shows that there is a limit to how much Quintessence the first model can absorb before it overloads. This is where Seasons 7 and 8 clarifies the purpose of the Robeast project: attaching the Komar to a mech makes it more mobile, and by designing them to draw on the Quintessence of the pilot as a fuel source, they can absorb larger quantities of Quintessence over longer periods of time.

But by now, you’re wondering where Shiro being the Galra’s “greatest weapon” fit into this. During the wait between seasons four and five, it was pointed out that the bio for the Black Lion on the official VLD website states that the Black Lion “takes the most energy from its pilot”. Given the indications that the lions are fueled by the Quintessence of their pilots, this indicates that a potential Black Paladin needs to generate enough Quintessence in their body to not pass out from the energy drain every time they fly. Ideally, this means that if Haggar found a Black Paladin candidate with enough Quintessence reserves in their body to survive sustained piloting of a Komar-Robeast, she could then clone them to have a mass-produced Quintessence battery.

Zarkon doesn’t seem like he would have been okay with being cloned, mainly because he wouldn't want anyone getting access to his genetic material. So Haggar has to look elsewhere for potential Quintessence batteries. That’s where her arena projects come in. It's shown in Season 1 that the gladiator Myzax was also Haggar’s personal project at the time of Shiro’s capture. But the question of why she had him in the arena where he could be killed, and why she kept him alive afterwards, was never textually answered. But in the subtext of what her Robeasts were being used for, we can take a guess. Judjging by how we’ve been shown the robeasts drawing on their pilot’s Quintessence as a power source, I think the energy weapon Myzax used in the arena was also designed to use his own Quintessence as a power source. And given the way he uses it, I think there’s enough details in canon to suggest that Shiro’s Galra prosthetic functions similarly.  

With her subtextual desire to find individuals with naturally high amounts of Quintessence in their bodies, Haggar appears to have been using the empire’s gladiator arenas to find potential candidates, and test how their physiology reacts to using weapons that are powered by their own Quintessence. Myzax was the reigning champion of the arena at the time because he was the best she could find. He was a peerless fighter, but his weapon had limitations. The orb needed to be returned to the base of the weapon to recharge. In retrospect, this is implicitly to give his body time to replenish its Quintessence before resuming the attack.

And then along comes this human from a backwater planet that's not even on the empire's radar, who defeats Haggar’s best test subject with nothing but a plain sword and his own ingenuity. He’s a peerless fighter, a symbol of hope for the enslaved prisoners, an amazing pilot, and has all the makings of being a capable leader. Really, he couldn’t be more obvious unless he had “Future Black Paladin” tattooed across his face in Galran. He’s basically everything Haggar could want in a Robeast pilot gift wrapped and offered up on a silver platter. Once he’s spent enough time in the arena that she can be certain his victory over Myzax wasn’t a fluke, she starts the next round of experiments.

She took his arm and installed the prosthetic with an energy weapon powered by his own Quintessence, then tests to make sure that he can survive it. Once she’s certain she has what she’s looking for, she takes his genetic material and starts production of her clone army. But then Ulaz frees him and sends him back to Earth. No wonder she sounds so frustrated when she fights him in the Season 1 finale. After all, if the Shiro-Komar-Robeast combination is the pinnacle of ten thousand years of research and experimentation, what else would she call him if not her greatest weapon?

But after the end of Season 2, the plan has shifted. It’s clear to Haggar after her failed attempt to use the Komar against Voltron that Zarkon will never be able to capture the lions. And with Zarkon’s link to the Black Lion completely severed, her husband will never be able to command Voltron himself. So, she switches gears and starts putting other irons in the fire, fading into the background as she works out a Plan B. Since she can’t capture Voltron, she redirects her energy to destroying it, via Naxzela in Season 4 and the virus in Kuron’s arm in Season 6. She stops sending Robeasts after Voltron because with Zarkon comatose she doesn’t have the resources or authority to do so without Zarkon on the throne. But she still keeps plugging away at the energy requirement for reopening the rift, even if we don’t see the results until at least Season 6.

This, I think, is where things diverge from what the writers were planning for the second and third arcs before they brought Shiro back in Season 3 and had the Keith leaving bit in Seasons 4-6. Back when Season 3 came out, the showrunners said that they had been forced to bring Shiro back early, not that he hadn’t been supposed to come back at all. What this suggests to me is that Keith would still have learned of Shiro’s death in Season 6, but without a body to transfer his consciousness into, Season 7 would have seen him filling a similar role to Alfor’s AI in Season 1.

And then the cliffhanger ending of the season would have been finding a Shiro Clone in the cockpit of the Komar Robeast. In addition to the added implicit horror that every mech they fought was being piloted by a clone of Shiro with enough of his memories to know how to fly and just enough self-awareness to act independently, it would basically have given them a free way to pull Shiro’s consciousness out of the Black Lion and restore him to life.

But since the execs wanted Shiro to be brought back in Season 3, Haggar instead sent one clone loaded with Shiro’s memories (how she got the post-escape ones is a mystery to be puzzled out later) to infiltrate the team and serve as her unwitting spy. Once she had the information she needed (plus Lotor and the remaining two Sincline ships), she pulled Kuron out, crippled the Castle of Lions, and ordered him to lead Keith away. But even underneath her brainwashing, the clone was still fundamentally Shiro, and fought against her the only way he could: lead Keith to the cloning facility and have a fight big and destructive enough to deprive her of a critical resource.

Because when you think about it, if Honerva had still had access to her army of Black Paladin Quintessence Batteries, she would have been able to open the rift and pull Lotor from the Quintessence Field in a lot less than three years. The destruction of Operation Kruon and Lotor stealing back the Sincline ships were a major setback for her in the same way that the end of Season 2 was. And by the time she gets her feet back under her, her reasons for getting into the Rift have changed. Whether it was just For Science or she was the herald of some eldritch space god like some of us have speculated is ultimately irrelevant after Season 6 because from the moment she realizes that Lotor’s stuck in the rift, her priority is getting her son back.

But with Operation Kuron gone and no trans-reality ships in sight, she had to start over from scratch. So, she takes her Komar and her Robeasts and heads for the Altean colony, where she knows that she’ll have an army fanatically devoted to her son, all ready and willing to do whatever she asks of them in the name of bringing their savior home. She casts the Druids aside now that she no longer needs them and sends Sendak to Earth to destroy the lions so that Voltron cannot interfere with her plans. It takes another three years, but that’s hardly a drop in the bucket for a woman who’s been alive for millennia. She’s been playing the long game for thousands of years, and she knows how to adapt. 

TL;DR: Haggar’s goal of accessing the Quintessence Field never changed, even if her reasons (Power>Retrieve Lotor) and methods for doing so (Shiro Robeasts>Altean Robeasts) shifted over time.


End file.
